Dawn Of Humanity Video Analysis

The video Dawn of Humanity is an interesting lesson about trying to bridge that gap between the Australopiths and homo genus. They briefly talk about previous finds such as Lucy and the different characteristics of Australopiths and homos. We watch how Professor Lee Berger worked with a group of scientist and climbers to explore a cave system that held thousands of bone fragments. Two cave climbers Steve and Rick were the ones who originally found the bones and took photos of them to show their friend Pablo who showed Lee. This is what started the Rising Star excavation. Lee found 11 scientists who were small enough to fit in the caves and bring out the fossils. It was a three-week project where they found 2,000 bone fragments that belonged to 12 different people. They were able to determine that it was a new member of the homo genus. The video goes into some detail about what traits distinguishes humans from apes and the different fossil evidence to separate our ancestors. The main thing that separates humans from our ape like ancestors is bipedalism. We are able to walk long distances and no longer have brachiation like arboreal primates. Our ancestors can be divided by how bipedal they were. Some of our ancestors
This suggests that we may not have one direct ancestor but a genetic mixture of many through cross breeding. The video talks about how we want to group species together in family trees but that does not seem to be true. We cannot find a straight line through out ancestors to make a clean family tree. They believe it was more of a bush that had many small branches that may have been messy and complicated. They compared it to evolutionary experiments that different populations were trying and some succeeding while others died out. It would be extremely hard to make a straight line through that evolutionary